Before coming to Oxford, I’d met a single person who’d gone to a private school. I certainly didn’t know what a ‘public’ school was.
I was, therefore, more than a little intrigued – not to mention apprehensive – to experience this alien group of people en masse at university. Who were these strangers that had paid for their education? Would they look down their noses at me? Would I actually be able to pick them out of a crowd? I even applied to a college that didn’t have a grand, historically impressive reputation in an effort to avoid these unknown people. My attempt, as it turns out, would be in vain – St Hilda’s college actually has one of the highest private school intakes of the Oxford colleges.
Now in my final year, I can confirm that while I usually am able to tell who went to a private school and who didn’t, it doesn’t particularly affect my perception of people (I even ended up dating a guy from an all-boys’ school for eighteen months – whoops). If anything, I think there’s many good qualities that my privately educated peers possess. They’re often more confident in themselves and their ideas; less afraid to speak their minds; more inclined to try out new hobbies and societies. While this is obviously a vast generalisation, I do think there is something to be said for coming from a schooling system that encourages individual expression and actually doing your homework. At state school, it was embarrassing to join a club that wasn’t sports. At my ex boyfriend’s school, the peak of ‘cool’ was being the lead in the school musical. It’s a very Troy Bolton lens of living that I’m absolutely here for.
That being said, I’m not sure the teenage girls of the mid 2000s ever had to sit in an Oxford tutorial with the high school musical heartthrob. If they had, I’m not entirely sure the floppy hair would have had quite the same effect. As it turns out, a healthy dollop of quarter-zipped confidence paired with the unfortunate disposition of being a man makes for quite the academic peer. While I was lucky enough to observe such individuals in watered-down quantities in my first year, it wasn’t until Hilary of second year that I was exposed in full to their rah-ing magnificence. It was entirely my own fault. I’d always picked relatively ‘girly’ modules up until this point in my history degree, that is, until I landed on NATIONALISM as my next academic endeavour.
As it turns out, studying ‘nationalism in the nineteenth century’ attracts the type of men who love tanks, planes and World War One manoeuvres, but have been told they need to ‘branch out a bit’ to tick off the curriculum requirements. They were loud, posh, and obnoxiously competitive with one another. Perfectly nice… sure. But step one foot inside the seminar room and they’d be off yammering like strategists inside Churchill’s war-room. Why use ten words to make a point when you can use fifty longer ones? When the tutor did occasionally manage to get a word in, it was often to double-check what they were actually banging on about. To this day, I’m not entirely sure. My class notes from the time comprise largely of the most entertaining statements and interactions that I observed in those sessions, not wanting to put the excellent people-watching to waste. It certainly brightens up my revision.
They look something like this:
‘Nob number 1 is bristling to explain what this particular rebellion was caused by. He doesn’t miss a beat in launching into a speech before the tutor has even drawn a breath. Nob number 2 cuts off nob number 1 mid-sentence to get to the point first. Nob number 3 then unnecessarily gives the exact date – nobody asked – so as to outdo the others. Another guy randomly interrupts the tutor to start talking about something completely unrelated.’
It was great fun. Okay, in truth, it was absolutely awful at the time. I felt like a complete idiot, not being able to follow anything and too afraid to speak up in case nob number 1, 2 or 3 told me outright that I was ‘wrong’ – something we’re discouraged from doing in history anyway. It was obvious that they’d never been told to shut up in their lives. It wasn’t a discussion, it was a competition of egos and information. The schooling system they’d all come from – and don’t ask me how I knew they were privately educated – had taught them that their opinions were valid and that they should stand by them. Society had taught them the same, as men. These are valuable philosophies, of course, but a bit of hesitancy and self-awareness wouldn’t go amiss either. There were some other girls in the class, but very few spoke voluntarily. I’m no sociologist, but it seems clear to me that this stands indicative of a wider societal issue.
I’d thought I liked a debate as much as the next person. How wrong I was.
Some days the classes would run well over the 90 minutes allotted. I understood in these moments, glancing surreptitiously at the clock, why white men write manifestos. I suspect it’s because they struggle to find anyone willing to listen to them in person for long enough. I think some of these guys genuinely thought they were rivalling Hegel and Rousseau by making long elaborate points that essentially boiled down to ‘everybody conceptualises nationalism differently, huh’. One of my personal favourite interactions came at the end of a particularly long and painful class. The tutor seemed as bewildered and fed up as I did. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ve been going for a while so I think we’ll finish now.’ Then the fool made his fatal mistake. He followed it up with a joking ‘unless, of course, anyone thinks they’ve stumbled across THE golden point?’. I actually put my head in my hands as several mouths around the room snapped open like a chorus of hungry baby birds.
I spoke to my [female] college tutors about my experience at the time. They groaned sympathetically, and told me that male obnoxiousness is not limited to undergraduate level. They still deal with it on a daily basis. I hope you take the same, albeit slightly depressing, comfort in this as I did. Hopefully you haven’t had to endure such company in one of your classes or tutorials. If you have, you’re not alone if it made you feel lesser. You do actually deserve to be here. Contrary to popular belief, persistent yapping does not constitute intelligence, nor are academic contributions valued by the word. If you’re someone who was insulted by this article, then it might be time for some self-reflection… quietly.
And if you’re someone from my nationalism class in Hilary of last year – whoops. Looking forward to seeing you in our revision class in Trinity…